Conference Program

This contribution re-reads Aldo Capitini’s Antifascismo tra i giovani through the interpretive frame offered by the recent editorial re-publication, which presents antifascism as an open-ended process rather than as a closed chapter of national memory. In this perspective, antifascism is not reduced to commemorative rhetoric: it is treated as a formative and political practice that can still address young people because it connects ideas, biographies, places, and collective relations, and because it links resistance to the principles and methods of nonviolence.

The paper develops three pedagogical cores that emerge from this reading. First, the intergenerational character of antifascism: the text is configured as a network of encounters, voices, and itineraries that can be re-activated as an educational device, especially where school curricula risk isolating the history of fascism within linear and self-contained narratives. Secondly, the Capitinian lexicon of “openness” (apertura) and “Thou” (Tu): Capitini’s insistence on practice/attention, dialogue, care for relationships, and refusal of “heads” (charismatic cults and hierarchical leadership) provides criteria for democratic education beyond moral exhortation and offers an antidote to what Eco has described as the re-emergent potential of “eternal fascism.” Third, the horizon of “all” (tutti) and “copresence” (compresenza) as a regulative idea for civic learning: democratic formation is interpreted as an exercise in expanding the community of reference and building relational infrastructures that make meaningful participation possible.

On this basis, the contribution specifies a didactic and organizational proposal explicitly aligned with the panel’s focus on nonviolent education and the demilitarization of schools, understood as the dismantling of punitive, competitive, and hierarchical logics that are often normalized in everyday routines, and as a reorientation of school environments (physical, symbolic, and relational) towards active, positive peace. The proposal translates Capitini’s intergenerational antifascism into a set of practices and tools that work simultaneously on (i) teachers’ “self-work” and professional habitus, (ii) classroom and school governance as a democratic laboratory, and (iii) the wider local educational ecosystem.

The aim is to propose Capitini’s intergenerational, nonviolent antifascism as a resource for renewing civic education: not as an additional content block, but as a method for cultivating democratic agency, critical vigilance toward authoritarian drifts, and a disciplined capacity for conflict transformation.